Dancing In The Dark
by HeadGirl91
Summary: Darcy Lewis knew she should have run as soon as they got back to the lab and her iPod was stolen by a government agent.


_Okay, I know how to say Yes, No, and Goodbye in Russian. I don't know how to write them, and I won't abuse Google Translate to write Russian into this fic. I hope I've made it clear what is said in Russian and what isn't, but just in case:_

"English," she said.

" _Russian,"_ she said.

 _I've taken some liberties with the Red Room, but based it on what I know of it from the movies and the comics._

 _Title comes from the Bruce Springsteen song. I thought the lyrics suited the fic quite well._

* * *

 **Dancing In The Dark**

Darcy Lewis knew she should have run as soon as they got back to the lab and her iPod was stolen by a government agent.

She's not entirely sure why she didn't. Maybe she was tired; tired of always running. Maybe she just liked Jane too much; the quirky little scientist was a breath of fresh air compared to what Darcy had had to deal with in her lifetime. Maybe she'd just gotten complacent. It had been four years since anyone had caught up with her, and when there had been a time when she was almost caught several times a week, four years seems like an eternity.

She knew about S.H.I.E.L.D. of course. What she knew about them made it even more stupid that she hadn't immediately turned tail and headed for the hills. All of this time and she risked getting caught by S.H.I.E.L.D... Maybe she was just unconsciously giving up. That, or she had gotten bored and was now living life with a more dangerous edge than before.

Darcy had stopped dying her hair and had grown it out, like she had worn it when she was a teenager. She still wore glasses, although she didn't need them, feeling safer having a distinguishing feature that set her apart from who she had been before... what she was.

After the Destroyer had been stopped and Thor was embracing Jane in the middle of Main Street, black SUVs pulled up everywhere. Darcy slunk back, instinctually making herself look less noticeable. Although, with Thor, Sif, and the Warriors Three in the foreground, she couldn't imagine anyone would be paying attention to the intern in the back.

Agent iPod Thief was talking to Thor and Jane. Darcy wasn't really taking much notice. Having this many agents so close was making her very nervous. All she had to do, she kept telling herself, was keep quiet and wait for them to go. They don't know anything about her. She isn't interesting.

She was so busy repeating this to herself that she didn't notice the red-haired female agent standing behind Agent iPod Thief recognize her until she gasped her name.

A name that Darcy hadn't heard in a long time.

"Nina?"

Darcy's head came up and met a familiar gaze.

"Natalia?" she gasped.

Everyone had gone quiet, looking between the two of them.

"Romanoff?"

Agent iPod Thief broke the spell and Darcy ran.

* * *

Natasha wasn't supposed to be there. If Clint hadn't begged so hard for a week off, she wouldn't have been.

Coulson would still have called Clint in, regardless, but Natasha managed to talk him out of it.

"An 084 and possible Alien contact?" she had said. "Clint'd be here like a shot. And this is his first time off since he started working here! You know he needs a break; especially after that clusterfuck of a mission in Seattle," she pointed out. She was going for kind, concerned, friend. There was no need to let Coulson know that there was no way on Earth she was going to be left out of a mission where there may be possible alien contact. She'd rub it into Clint later.

Coulson sighed. "I need a sniper-" he began.

"I'm no Hawkeye, but I am more than capable," she argued. "Let me do this."

In the end, Coulson relented, and she was on her way to New Mexico.

She was glad. Norse god with biceps she would struggle to get both hand round? Yes please!

She had begged off raiding Jane Foster's lab, claiming she didn't look enough like a 'suit' to do it. Coulson just rolled his eyes, but let her stay behind to watch the hammer anyway.

Now, it looked like they were wrapping up, without much actual effort on their part. The giant robot had been destroyed and it looked like all the civilians were safe.

Natasha stood, slightly bored, but prepared if an unexpected attack was to occur, behind Coulson, when a small movement caught her eye.

It was a young woman, standing behind the group that included Thor and friends. She must have been Jane Foster's intern. The woman seemed to be casually slinking back, attempting to get out of view behind the group. This wouldn't have caught most peoples' attention, but Natasha Romanoff was not most people.

The woman's dark hair was covering most of her fact, but when she moved again, her hair shifted and her face came into view.

Natasha gasped.

"Nina?"

She couldn't have stopped the name escaping her lips if she had tried.

The woman's head snapped up and their eyes met.

"Natalia?" came the answer.

The world seemed to freeze for a moment, years of memories playing between the two women, before Coulson spoke her name, breaking the spell and the other woman turned heel and ran.

* * *

Nina Sitnikova Ivanovna never met her parents. Well, if she had, she was too young to remember it. None of the other girls had parents, either; she knew that much. Although, getting too close to the other girls was frowned upon.

Red Room Operatives were not supposed to _feel._

Nina was good at what she did. She was good at following orders. But none were better than Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Natalia was a work of art. She moved with a grace none of the other girls could ever hope to achieve, and struck with deadly accuracy.

Most of the girls here wanted to be her.

Nina didn't.

Nina just wanted to be near her.

She started paying closer attention to Natalia, being wherever she was, seemingly by accident. She was always careful to not draw attention to what she was doing in front of the trainers. If they caught on to it, they could take her away; _retrain her._

The thought of that was enough to make her cautious.

Natalia got used to her after a while. She was slightly annoyed at first but by the time they were fourteen years old, Natalia would find herself being the one to seek out Nina's company. She wasn't entirely sure why.

Nina was the first person to call her Natasha, the fond diminutive of her name; although, never where anyone else could hear. In turn, Natalia called her Ninoshka.

It all changed as graduation got closer.

Nina was aware that she wasn't like the other girls. She wasn't like Natalia. The girls completed their orders with no hesitation, no guilt afterwards. They were certain that this is what they were meant to do. Even Natalia seemed content with her purpose.

Nina was uneasy.

When graduation came and they were... altered, Nina knew her time was growing short. She knew that Natalia had been purchased by the KGB. She would likely never see her friend again.

The trainers underestimated her.

Nina was the best with technology. All the girls learned quickly and knew how to hack, how to repair systems, and how to use technology to their advantage; but no one knew their way around computer systems like Nina did.

It wasn't hard to set up a false communication from an organization, requesting an agent with her specifics.

The Red Room let her go; happily counting the money that Nina had hacked from several different accounts as 'payment' for her.

They didn't realize she had escaped them for over a week.

They sent the trainers first, hoping to snap back some of her conditioning, which they believed had fallen. They didn't know that the conditioning had never took hold in the first place. She had faked through it for so long for Natalia. Always for Natalia.

After she sent the third trainer back to them in three separate pieces, they started to send girls, and Nina started to think it was a good idea to leave the country.

She became Mila Zhivkova in Bulgaria; Maria Bassini in Italy; Hollie Davis in England. Thanks to her training, she blended seamlessly, picking up languages and accents with practiced ease.

Years later, barely looking any older than the day she decided to leave the country she was born in, she became the American Darcy Lewis. Four years after that, she found herself in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, running away from the woman who had once been her best friend, fear clutching at her chest and tears in her eyes.

* * *

Natasha didn't even think. Nina ran and Natasha ran after her, ignoring the shouts from behind. Nina was fast, faster than normal humans and with more stamina, but so was she.

There wasn't anywhere much to run to, in this tiny town in the butt crack of nowhere, but Nina was trying.

It was only when they approached the outskirts of town and the remains of a car that had been crushed in the Destroyer's rampage that Nina slowed down. Eventually, she stopped and faced her.

Natasha understood. The car had been part of Nina's escape plan. In the middle of the New Mexico desert, she knew she wasn't getting anywhere without transport. It would take too long to hotwire a car with Natasha on her ass.

Nina had nowhere to run and she was smart enough to know that there was no way that she was going to win a fight against Natasha. She never had, even when they were children.

Natasha stopped, keeping some distance between her and her old friend.

When Nina spoke, the Russian spilling off her tongue felt familiar, yet the words hit her like a bullet in the chest.

" _Are you here to kill me, Natasha?"_

"Ninoshka…" The name fell from her lips like a sigh, surprising her. She answered in English. "I thought you were dead."

Nina's lips twitched. "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

There was silence between the two of them as they took each other in, each automatically assessing the other for weapons, weaknesses.

"It's been four years since anybody has come after me," Nina told her. "Svetlana thought she could 'talk' me into coming back. You know how good she was with knives. It didn't work out so well for her. I'm not going back Natalia."

Natasha didn't take her eyes off of Nina. "You don't have to." She spoke quietly, but she knew Nina could hear her. "The Red Room no longer exists. You're free."

Nina froze. "I- You- What-?" she stammered.

"Four years ago, my first mission with S.H.I.E.L.D. was dismantling every aspect of the Red Room," Natasha told her. "To my knowledge, you and I are the only operatives left alive."

Nina's eyes flickering was all the warning she got, but it was enough to hit the deck with considerable force as an object flew through the space she had occupied milliseconds earlier.

"Thor!" Nina shouted. "Thor! Stop!"

A mountain of blond Norse god came barreling towards her and she leapt to her feet, gracefully.

"You shall not harm Lady Darcy!" Thor bellowed. He held out his hand and Natasha dodged the flying object once more as his hammer came back towards him, as if magnetized.

Coulson was on Thor's heels, pointing his gun at Thor and yelling at him to stop and put the hammer down. Thor didn't seem to want to listen to him, starting for Natasha menacingly.

Nina was between them so quickly that Natasha barely saw her move.

"Stop," she said to Thor, firmly. "I'm fine." She turned to Natasha, but still spoke to Thor. "She's a friend. An old friend."

Nina walked over to Natasha and stood in front of her, hands out to the sides, non-threatening. She looked up into Natasha's eyes and spoke, the Russian spoken by her old friend bringing back so many memories.

" _I've been running for so long, Natasha,"_ she said, not breaking their gaze. _"What do I do now?"_

She looked so lost Natasha slowly brought her arms up, making her intentions clear, before wrapping them around Nina, holding her tightly, reassuringly.

" _Live, Ninoshka,"_ she murmured. _"Live."_

* * *

Darcy sat in a S.H.I.E.L.D. holding cell, keeping herself still; calm. Natalia swore to her that she would get her out of there as soon as she was processed and the higher ups were sure that she wouldn't be a threat.

Darcy and Natalia had shared an amused look at that. The two of them… if they chose to be, could always be a threat; always dangerous.

She considered her life; the running, the hiding, the pretense. It was all a part of who she was. Without it, who was she?

Her brain answered for her.

She was Darcy Lewis.

* * *

Coulson didn't ask questions until they got back to HQ. Natasha answered the first one before he even asked it.

"Nina Sitnikova Ivanovna," she stated.

"Who does she work for?" he asked, leaning against his desk with his arms crossed.

Natasha was silent for a moment. "No one," she replied.

"No one?" Coulson questioned. "How do you know her?"

Natasha looked at him. "I think you know."

Coulson closed his eyes. "She got out?" he asked, eventually.

"Before I did," she replied.

Coulson's eyes flew open. "Wha-?"

"I asked about her. They told me that she had died on her first mission; that she was weak; that we should all learn from it." Natasha looked at the wall behind Coulson, instead of directly at him.

"They lied."

"Obviously," Natasha snorted.

They were quiet for a moment.

"Do you trust her?"

The question threw her off balance. She had been expecting it, but it still threw her when it came. She thought about it and answered honestly.

"With everything I've got."

* * *

Natalia had been sat on the chair on the opposite side of the cell for over five minutes. Neither of them had spoken a word.

She decided to be the one to break the silence.

"Ten."

Natalia looked up. She didn't say anything, just waited for her to go on.

"Ekaterina, Dominika, Renata, Lucya, Olesya, Elena, Klara, Svetlana, Irina, and Anna," she recited. "In that order."

Natalia still didn't speak, letting Darcy get it off her chest.

"Ekaterina hadn't been told I was the target. She was so startled that I was able to slip away. They sent her back and she was different. Harsher. She'd been punished… retrained… for letting me escape. I knew she'd keep coming. And she did. Three times. I didn't want to do it, Natalia. I kept seeing the little blonde six year old girl who complained about the differences between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet so much she decided to come up with her own Universal alphabet." She smiled slightly, caught in memory. "The trainers were easy to kill. The girls… I was so afraid that the next one was going to be you, Natasha. I was so afraid because if it was you…"

She was caught up. Nina Ivanovna did not cry. Darcy Lewis, however, had no such two personalities were warring inside her.

"I'm tired, Natasha," she admitted. "I don't know who I am anymore."

Natalia spoke for the first time since she had entered the cell.

"Who do you want to be?"

She thought about it.

"Nina Ivanovna is a trained Russian assassin who has been on the run since she was eighteen years old and has killed almost half of the girls she grew up with. She wasn't allowed to show emotion. She wasn't allowed to have friends. She wasn't allowed to feel." She caught Natalia's gaze. "That didn't stop her from tagging along after Natalia. Natalia was everything everyone else wanted to be. But Nina didn't want to be with Natalia. She just wanted to be near her. She..." Her breath caught and she took a moment to get back under control. "Darcy Lewis is an American College student who speaks her mind, isn't afraid to tell people how she feels and used a taser on a Norse god. She cares about people. She has friends... She's everything Nina Ivanovna was never allowed to be..." She sighed. "I would choose to be Darcy Lewis in a heartbeat. But I would never give up knowing Natalia Romanava. Not for anything."

There was silence when she had finished speaking. Natalia didn't move. When she did, she did so with the grace she seemed to have possessed since birth.

Natalia stood in front of her and held out her hand.

"Hello, Darcy Lewis. My name is Natasha Romanoff. I'm an ex-Russian assassin and now I work for S.H.I.E.L.D."

Darcy Lewis looked up at her, tears blurring her vision.

"Hello, Natasha Romanoff," she replied. "Fancy going for coffee sometime so I can regale you with the story of how I tased a Norse god?"

Natasha smiled.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world."


End file.
